The Cosmos of the Ancient Greeks, the piu nel’ uno, “The Many in One,” appear in the Essay on Michael Angelo as they also appear in his “Nature.”  The last thought takes wings to itself and rises in the little poem entitled “Each and All.”  The “Rhodora,” another brief poem, finds itself foreshadowed in the inquiry, “What is Beauty?” and its answer, “This great Whole the understanding cannot embrace.  Beauty may be felt.  It may be produced.  But it cannot be defined.”  And throughout this Essay the feeling that truth and beauty and virtue are one, and that Nature is the symbol which typifies it to the soul, is the inspiring sentiment. Noscitur a sociis applies as well to a man’s dead as to his living companions.  A young friend of mine in his college days wrote an essay on Plato.  When he mentioned his subject to Mr. Emerson, he got the caution, long remembered, “When you strike at a King, you must kill him.”  He himself knew well with what kings of thought to measure his own intelligence.  What was grandest, loftiest, purest, in human character chiefly interested him.  He rarely meddles with what is petty or ignoble.  Like his “Humble Bee,” the “yellow-breeched philosopher,” whom he speaks of as

  “Wiser far than human seer,”

and says of him,

  “Aught unsavory or unclean
  Hath my insect never seen,”

he goes through the world where coarser minds find so much that is repulsive to dwell upon,

  “Seeing only what is fair,
  Sipping only what is sweet.”

Why Emerson selected Michael Angelo as the subject of one of his earliest lectures is shown clearly enough by the last sentence as printed in the Essay.

“He was not a citizen of any country; he belonged to the human race; he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledged the beauty that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness.”

Consciously or unconsciously men describe themselves in the characters they draw.  One must have the mordant in his own personality or he will not take the color of his subject.  He may force himself to picture that which he dislikes or even detests; but when he loves the character he delineates, it is his own, in some measure, at least, or one of which he feels that its possibilities and tendencies belong to himself.  Let us try Emerson by this test in his “Essay on Milton:”—­

“It is the prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour foremost of all men in literary history, and so (shall we not say?) of all men, in the power to inspire.  Virtue goes out of him into others.” ...  “He is identified in the mind with all select and holy images, with the supreme interests of the human race.”—­“Better than any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity,—­to